IN JOHN BOORMAN'S 1967 film Point Blank, Lee Marvin was a man with a mission. Cheated and left for dead, he became a force of nature in his single-minded determination to get back what was his.
Though Point Blank was recently remade as the Mel Gibson vehicle Payback, which was nowhere near as bad as most critics made it out to be, an even better remake is Steven Soderbergh's The Limey. Here, Terence Stamp plays the unstoppable force of nature; but instead of money, he's searching for the person responsible for killing his daughter.
Though vengeance is the driving force in both movies, The Limey is a more personal film. Boorman was exploring the bureaucracy and de-personalization of crime, and Soderbergh adds to that a level of introspection. Like Marvin, Stamp is also a cold and efficient killer on a quest, but his quest is to find a connection between himself and his now-dead daughter.
Soderbergh expands on the style he began to explore in Out of Sight: a layering of visual flashbacks and flash-forwards, grounded with dialogue. Whereas most filmmakers pad their films to two hours or more, this layering compresses what would normally be a two-hour movie into 90 action-packed minutes that keep moving and keep you thinking.
The stylized, '60s-era, French New Wave-inspired filmmaking matches the disjunction between the '60s and the '90s played up throughout the whole movie. Stamp (as well as Limey co-star Peter Fonda) was big in the '60s, and is now striving to stay afloat in the '90s. Also, the idea of a distant father -- the emotionally out-of-touch male trying to come to terms with his daughter (even though she's dead, or maybe because she's dead) -- is a very '90s thing, and very difficult for this '60s relic.
I'll say it right now: The Limey is one of the best films of the year, and Steven Soderbergh is one of the most interesting filmmakers working today. I can't wait to see what he does next.
